Ship of Ghosts (25 page)

A
s dawn broke over Bantam Bay on March 1, the
Houston
’s survivors could at last see the full extent of the Japanese landing operation and their own incidental place in its midst. “The bay was as slick as glass, not a ripple anywhere except in the wake of the landing barges plying between the transports and the shore with their loads of supplies and troops,” wrote Bill Weissinger, floating with a group of
Houston
survivors led by Lt. Joseph F. Dalton. “The surface was dotted with all sorts of objects: boxes, crates, lumber, all types of containers, and life jackets—some empty…some occupied.” According to John Wisecup, on another raft, “Transports lined the beach as far as the eye could see, busily discharging troops and equipment with little visible resistance.” Too tired to swim for shore, the Americans drifted, watching the barges going back and forth, wondering if one might come for them. In time, a barge hauled out in their direction.

As the thirty-footer pulled alongside, Dalton urged his shipmates to remove any insignia that might identify their ship. The Japanese engineer in charge of the craft motioned them aboard, seated them on deck, then began making “strange guttural-snarling sounds which we found out later was the Japanese language,” Weissinger wrote. With the life raft towed behind it, the barge got under way and headed for one of the large transports. The Japanese engineer and his coxswain passed around cigarettes. Then the coxswain approached Lieutenant Dalton.

“Ingeris, ka?”

English? Dalton didn’t hesitate to correct him. “No. American,” he said.

The enemy sailor dismissed this out of hand.
“No America. All America finis. Ingeris.”
The two men disputed the question of nationality in pidgin for a few minutes until the barge reached the transport, then the Japanese sailor gave up.

The coxswain threw over a line, went up the gangway, and conferred with the troop carrier’s officer of the deck. Then without comment he came back down and released the line. The engineer
throttled up again and steered the barge toward another vessel. They had no more luck with that one. In all, four different transports refused custody of the Dalton gang. “Nobody wanted us,” wrote Bill Weissinger. The engineer was finally left with no alternative but to cast them loose again. The coxswain cut the line towing the raft listlessly behind, and indicated that the survivors were to swim for it. As they went overboard again, three rifle-armed soldiers on the large transport walked along the rail. The troopship was moving just fast enough to keep the survivors on its beam. The Americans braced for gunfire. Reaching the raft and ducking behind its lee side, they cowered and drifted until they were out of range and their only enemy, once again, was the sea.

S
ome sailors drifted for days. Others were lucky enough to reach shore right away. Survivors who struggled ashore at the first opportunity were almost always rewarded with a quick capture. This was the fate of Frank Gillan, the lucky
Perth
lieutenant who appears to have been the last man off his ship.

Gillan rode a series of floating vehicles to survival, each one more seaworthy than the one before: a wooden plank, a Carley float, and finally a lifeboat, where he joined about seventy of his shipmates. An able sailor, Gillan got the mast and sails up, fashioned a tiller out of driftwood, and turned toward Sumatra before adverse headwinds forced him to shape a course back toward Java. Going slowly blind from the bunker oil clotting in his eyes, Gillan turned over the tiller to a sailor named McDonough. When the wind died at nightfall, they had to row. They were soon desperate with exhaustion. One sailor who started vomiting up oil was relieved of rowing but sat there for a time still pulling an invisible oar until someone eased him to the bottom boards, slick with the blood of the injured, to sleep. With a combination of “bullying and blarney and child psychology,” McDonough kept them bending to the oars. Two bodies were slid overboard as a chaplain named “Bish” Mathieson intoned the last rites. Finally, in the early hours of Monday, March 2, scarcely twenty-four hours since the
Perth
went down, they reached Java’s shore. They spread out the lifeboat’s sail on the beach like a tarp and arranged five wounded men on it. Then they slept.

At dawn Gillan awoke and the decision was made to split up their party, leaving the wounded on the beach while the healthy hiked
north and south looking for help. Gillan paired up with Bill Hogman, a stoker, who, unasked, took his hand and served as his eyes, leading him after the others all that day and far into the night, guiding his steps, explaining what the country looked like. At the village of Labuhan, miles south of their original landfall, they met a
Houston
officer—this might have been Lt. Joseph Dalton or Lt. (jg) Leon Rogers, who both reached Labuhan and met
Perth
survivors. The American told them to wait while he went to another village where other Yanks were said to be. The Dutch, he said, would provide them with transportation. About an hour later a native policeman showed up and handed them a handwritten note from the same U.S. officer saying there were no vehicles after all and advising the Australians to head for the hills and attempt a rendezvous with Dutch ground forces.

Crossing the coastal paddies toward higher ground, the two Australians encountered Chinese shopkeepers who gave them food. The offerings of the natives were harsher: spitting and unintelligible threats. At a hillside village that night, they slept in a small hospital, where they met a Dutch officer. “Can you get us arms and medical supplies?” Gillan wanted to know. An encouraging promise was made, but it did not survive the night. In the morning the Dutchman was gone.

“We can fight in the hills,” Gillan said, still unable to see. He and his mates walked all day up-country through plantations and jungle, hoping to find Dutch soldiers. What they found instead were sarong-clad hillmen armed with gleaming parangs and knives. Though Gillan was enjoying the return of his eyesight—he could see if he pulled his lids open with his fingers—he could do little to resist. When the natives became preoccupied with arguing among themselves, he and Hogman scrabbled together some good rocks to throw. Gillan carried a heavy stick too, which he waved threateningly at an armed hillman who approached him. Though they were outnumbered and overmatched, the standoff held. It lasted, at least, until a truck motor shredded the jungle’s peace. A small Japanese flag flew from its hood. The natives scattered.

As the vehicle sped into view, the Australians saw the vehicle’s occupants and resigned themselves to capture. There were three of them, all Indonesians. All wore white armbands emblazoned with a red rising sun. One of them leaped out and, pointing imperatively at the truck, said, “You prisoner. You be well treated.”
Gillan, exhausted and numb, complied. He and Hogman joined other prisoners in the truck as the driver got in, hit the gas, and began navigating the winding hillside roads. When they arrived at the town of Pandeglang, about twenty miles northeast of Labuhan, and parked near the town jail, crowds of natives filled the streets. They jeered,
“English finish, English finish!”,
spat at them, and smacked them with sticks.

Gillan, an engineer, was a machine-minded westerner. His dreams were of a familiar world he had learned to love: engine rooms, roaring burner fires, hissing boilers, screaming turbines, the smell of oil mixing with sweat. Now, like the rest of the sailors in captivity, he began adjusting to a different reality, an alien and primitive one. Somewhere along the way Gillan saw fit to speak a quick, quiet prayer: “Please, God, help us and deliver us all and look after our families at home.”

T
he men on John Wisecup’s life raft, whose senior man was a gravely wounded young lieutenant junior grade named Francis B. Weiler, fought Sunda Strait’s currents by using pieces of flotsam as oars and making fast a bowline that was towed by several of the stronger swimmers. Weiler had a gouge near his spine and a wound in his arm deep enough to show bone in the moonlight. After a day or two soaking in bunker oil, his arm festered and began to turn gangrenous. It swelled to twice its size. Drifting with the current, Weiler used his good arm to splash water on the parched, exhausted men who were doing the paddling. They worked doggedly, but thirst and fatigue pushed them toward madness. There were some outlandish conversations on that raft. Each time dawn came, Wisecup noticed, a few faces had gone missing.

Though morning on the third day revealed no land within sight, they knew enough to keep rowing, and somehow that afternoon the tide gave them a break, steering the currents back toward shore. With Weiler still lurching around the raft with one good arm, splashing water on folks and taking no notice of his wounds, John Wisecup looked toward the bowline and saw that the swimmers towing it had somehow changed their stroke. From the way their shoulders were moving above water, in fact, Wisecup was delighted to realize that they must be standing on the bottom. They hauled the raft toward the welcoming nearby beach. Two sailors carried
Weiler ashore and sat him against a coconut tree. Then several elderly Javanese men appeared with machetes. They cut the tops off some green coconuts and let the sailors drink their fill.

Few of the
Houston
’s survivors had seen the need to keep their shoes when they left the ship. Faithful to regulations to the end, most had placed them neatly by the gunwales before going overboard. “The deck looked like a used shoe store display,” Wisecup recalled. As the survivors pulled themselves over coral and rocks and onto land, they realized their mistake. Much later some of them would dream of the abandoned footwear as they wrapped their bleeding feet in rags, leaves, and carvings from rubber tires. Sailors from the deck force got by the best going barefoot. Months of trudging the
Houston
’s hot decks with holystones and hoses in hand had toughened their soles as the yeomen and radio operators could only have wished.

Survivors washed ashore at any number of scattered points. They organized themselves and tried to round up their friends, to heal them or get them healed. Pursuing varied routes of evasion and escape, they acquired stories divergent and dramatic enough to keep a Hollywood producer busy making wartime epics for the rest of his career. In search of help, they hiked mountains and dirt roads, forded streams and hailed rickshaws. But as often as not, the help turned out to be in league with the newly arriving Japanese.

Several centuries of weighty colonial administration had not disposed Java’s nationalists to like the Americans any better than they did the Dutch. Some say the Japanese, perhaps not quite appreciating their new subjects’ readiness to collaborate with them, put a fifty-guilder reward on white men captured dead or alive. The cash might not have been necessary. Rhetoric of a “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” fueled nascent Javanese nationalism and paid dividends of loyalty in the early going, netting the Imperial Army scores of prisoners. Survivors who caught wind of the natives’ hostility hid out in the hills, subsisting on water, coconuts, and scraps from friendly Sundanese villagers. These acts of kindness and generosity—providing nourishment, concealment, shelter, and likely routes toward Allied army positions—were frequent enough to prevent the question of trusting the locals from ever becoming completely decided.